An old friend drunkenly online tells me I was formative, I was meaningful, that I mattered.

Did I? Do I? Have I? When my bones break down and one of you throws me to the memory of trade winds and agony, will there be anything more left in the world than I started it with? Children sure, but will their legacy matter? Will they conquer or destroy? Or will they just be, as so many of us have, the magic possibility of childhood distilled down to the quiet realization that we are all just us, and no more?

Will I matter? Have I mattered?

Will any of us?

I wonder why I think it remains, this urge at immortality, this need to have affected someone, somewhere, to have nudged the fates in directions they weren't otherwise given. Why the drive for remembrance, when even I sometimes forget where I've been?

Why do I need to know?

***

I will last. I will be forever, for awhile. My mother lives through me, in sparse stories I can hardly remember, the womb which bore me manifests in my eyebrows and the cheekbones my daughters carry. My body will break apart and become others, flowers, thunderstorms, tears.

3 Responses to ““If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it””

I think we want the story we’re in to be big enough to have meaning beyond ourselves, and yet we want to be important enough characters in the story — I don’t think anyone would really be happy as the center of the universe, any more than as a worthless gnat.